


Amaranth

by naeildo



Category: Red Velvet (K-pop Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Before Sunrise Fusion, Alternate Universe - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Fusion, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:46:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24586330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naeildo/pseuds/naeildo
Summary: You know this story. Two strangers on a train in the middle of Europe are about to meet, and then: sparks. You know this story. I'm sure you do.
Relationships: Kang Seulgi/Son Seungwan | Wendy
Comments: 6
Kudos: 52
Collections: Girl Group Jukebox (Round 2)





	Amaranth

You know this story. Two strangers on a train in the middle of Europe are about to meet, and then: sparks. 

You know this story. I'm sure you do.

*

Seulgi's packed the wrong scarf. She doesn't remember packing it at all, actually, but it wouldn't be the first time. She finds out somewhere in the transit lounge of Heathrow airport in the midst of a 5-hour wait, digging through her luggage for her phone charger. Sooyoung would scold her again, if she knew, as if her ten messages sitting unread in Seulgi's Kakaotalk inbox needed any additions. 

This scarf is - familiar even if it isn’t hers, and Seulgi thinks she’d maybe accidentally taken it from Sooyoung’s wardrobe. It’s checkered a deep blue and red, and it feels thin and threadbare beneath her fingers. It’s sort of just generally falling apart at the seams, when she looks a little closer. But it's soft, at the very least, so she winds it around her neck.

Vienna will be cold this time of the year.

*

There’s a kind of pedestrian feeling to the train. It’s not terribly new, and Seungwan can spot the paint peeling on the edges of the window even if she doesn’t look closely. But there’s a charm to it, all the same, which is what she signed up for in the first place. Escape. A different kind of beauty.

“Sorry,” someone says to her, in clearly accented English, and she snaps to attention. Smiling is always better than not, in general, but especially around here when everyone already looks at her with some kind of suspicion. 

The girl standing before her has soft cheeks and deep, quiet eyes, and a ragged looking scarf that Seungwan feels like she owned, in some other universe. She’s holding a guidebook that’s written in Korean.

“This seat…?” The girl looks stiff. Awkward, like she’s afraid of Seungwan.

“It’s not taken,” she tells her in Korean, and watches the girl’s eyes widen for a moment before she breaks out into a smile. Her eyes disappear when she does, and her cheeks grow even rounder. And Seungwan finds, somehow, that - 

*

_“I think I saw you in a dream, once,” Seungwan says. “Before I even met you.”_

_Seulgi turns to lie on her arm so that she can face her, and there’s a smile on her face. A real one that makes her eyes crinkle. “That sounds very cheesy.”_

_Seungwan stares at the constellation of dots - acne scars, what could be faint freckles - across Seulgi’s face. She could see them even with her eyes closed, she’s sure._

_“I’m serious,” Seungwan says, rolling onto her back. Above her, the ceiling is decorated with glow-in-the-dark stars. She’d found them painted there after returning from a trip back to Toronto, and Seulgi had kissed her, first, before curling her hand around Seungwan’s and telling her they could see the stars from their room any time they wanted to, now, even in the dense concrete jungle that was Seoul._

_Sometimes it’s so bright that Seungwan can’t sleep. Most times Seulgi holds her close enough to block the light out._

_“It feels like I loved you before I knew you,” Seungwan says. And it sounds true, even if it can’t be, not really._

_Seulgi brings the back of her hand up to her lips, and Seungwan lets her kiss each knuckle, soft and quiet. Something bright stirring in her chest._

*

The train ride is a long one. Five hours of staring at each other won’t do after Seungwan’s phone ran out of battery quickly in the cold, so Seungwan tries to start some conversation. What brings you here? Where are you from? 

“There’s this movie I like,” the girl says, and there it is again, the faraway look in her eyes. Some kind of potent happiness that Seungwan has always wanted and never quite known how to have. Then she turns back to Seungwan, and there’s a kind of brightness in her eyes that makes her want to smile too. “It’s called Before Sunrise. I’ve always wanted to come here to just - experience all of it,” the girl says, and she’s gesticulating. It’s - adorable isn’t quite the word. Familiar. Warm. Something to come home to. She speaks from her heart, about something greater than herself. Not because of self-importance.

“I’ve never watched it,” Seungwan offers, carefully, “but I think I’d want to now.”

“Oh,” the girl says. “You don’t have to.”

“No,” Seungwan agrees. “But it must be something special.”

“Oh,” the girl says. “To - to me, it is. I could understand if anyone didn’t like it, but I could talk about it for hours, really, if - forgive me, I’m not normally this talkative, it’s just this train, and you’re so pretty -”

*

_At the very beginning - before all of this, Seulgi saw her first at a flower bazaar. She was holding a big, hulking bundle of bouquets, like she was going for ten graduations all at once, loose brown hair falling in her face, and Seulgi didn’t know what had overcome her, to offer her free hands. To cancel the plans she had with Joohyun to go shopping later._

_She’d reached out and grabbed a few bouquets, and crushed them straight away with her arms, and Seungwan had - laughed, after the initial shock. Only laughed, and took Seulgi’s calloused hand between her own gentle ones._

_Seulgi had always been a bit of a bumbling fool, from the beginning to the end. The first end._

*

“Do you believe in that?” the girl asks, and Seulgi finds for the first time that she’s barely taken a breath since she’d sat down. She isn't like this. She's never been like this.

Seulgi blinks. Remembers her manners. “Sorry?”

“Meeting someone, and immediately… immediately knowing.” They’re on an incline now, the light of the sun dancing across the other girl’s face. Casting sharp shadows across her features. The girl has a kind smile, bright and soft at the edges.

"Do you?"

"Not really," the girl says, smiling. Seulgi has a feeling she's being more honest than she's been this whole ride, looking straight at Seulgi. "I think it would be wonderful, though."

“I want to believe in it,” Seulgi decides, because she does, and watches something shift in the girl's eyes. She wants a brilliant, epic love. She does.

*

_Seungwan is waiting at the stairwell when she gets back. Seulgi isn’t that tired, even if it’s hard to climb the steps by herself. Even if Seungwan is crying as she pulls her up, and Seulgi can barely lift a hand to hold her._

_Seungwan drops her onto the couch, first, tucking her legs onto the cushion and under the quilt. Seulgi's tights chafe against her skin._

_“You don’t have to kill yourself,” Seungwan is saying, somewhere in the distance. Somewhere far enough that Seulgi has to really focus to hear her._

_“I’m not getting any younger,” Seulgi complains, which is what she always says, and it usually makes Seungwan laugh, capitulate and wrap her in a warm, quiet hold, until Seulgi drifts off to sleep. Instead, Seungwan is busying herself with something on the other side of the room, the sound of cutlery clattering into the basin._

_“Hey,” Seulgi says, staggering to her feet. She can only see the vaguest outline of Seungwan's face, but she knows it. The worry in her features. Feels her calves burn with the effort. “Seungwan,” Seulgi says. Tries. “Don’t be mad at me, please.”_

*

I remember you, Seungwan wants to say. I remember you, somehow.

“Seulgi, by the way” the girl says. She has bright, sharp eyes that soften when she smiles, when the light hits the planes of her face every time they come out of a tunnel. “That’s my name.”

Something twists in her chest. Seungwan unsticks her tongue from the roof of her mouth.

“Seungwan,” she offers. “Nice to meet you, Seulgi.”

*

_In the morning Seulgi dreams of a girl._

_Of her warm hands on a nighttime plane to Fukuoka, the armrest between them pulled up so Seulgi can lie on her shoulder._

_After touchdown, she realizes she’s lost her earmuffs somewhere in the airport, and the girl and her blurry face has been running all over trying to find another pair for her, and then Seulgi finds them in her coat pocket, and the girl is so angry that she cries, and Seulgi says sorry over and over and kisses her in a restroom stall, and -_

_“I had a strange dream,” Seulgi tells Sooyoung, stumbling out of her room. There’s dry saliva caked on the sides of her mouth._

_Sooyoung is already pulling on her coat, one arm through the left sleeve, but all the sharp angles of her face soften as she takes in Seulgi's unkempt state. She's holding in a laugh, Seulgi can tell._

_“Well, come out with it then,” Sooyoung demands, even as she slows in picking her bag up from the floor._

_“You know that time I went to Fukuoka?_

_It’s strange how Sooyoung stiffens, enough that even Seulgi notices it. “Yeah?”_

_“I dreamed that… I went with someone? A girl? I guess I’m so lonely that my subconscious is like, making things up -”_

_“Don’t you have practice in half an hour?” Sooyoung’s looking at her strangely, as if she wants to say something. As if she has a secret Seulgi doesn’t know. But they don’t have secrets between the two of them._

_“It just felt so real,” Seulgi says. Lifts a hand to scratch at the back of her head. Thinks of the warmth of the girl’s lips, and the feeling in her chest at the brightness of her smile. “That’s all.”_

*

“I think you should get off here with me,” Seulgi blurts, before the rest of her brain can catch up.

Seungwan's eyes flick back from where they were trained on the scenery outside.

“Sorry?”

“Explore the city with me.” Seungwan has a plane to catch, but Seulgi - is an idiot. Seulgi is an idiot. “I mean, only if you want. Or more like, only if it's convenient for you. Which, it's not -”

Seungwan presses the pads of her fingers to the high bridge of her nose, and her features soften into something that makes Seulgi's stomach feel like it's erupted in a thousand butterflies.

Seulgi watches as she opens her mouth as if to say something, then closes it, then stutters forward again. “It feels like I know you from somewhere,” and there’s confusion on her face that Seulgi feels, too. That it sounds so much like a confession.

“Sorry, I don’t - pretend I didn’t ask. I just -”

“I will,” Seungwan says. Her hand finds Seulgi's over the small train table, and it's soft and gentle, nothing like Seulgi's bandaged fingers, worn with time. Seungwan reaches past the glass of apple juice that she’d ordered when the cart rolled down the aisle. “I want to see Vienna.”

*

_Seulgi has some injeomi bingsu before the procedure. Seungwan had never really liked it, even if she always ate it more enthusiastically than Seulgi just because everything Seulgi loved she tried to too._

_Then she walks out the cafe door and into the building next to it. The elevator button lights up when Sooyoung presses it, and stays lit when Seulgi bumps against it again out of sheer force of habit._

_Looking through the form she filled in last week is a strange experience. Reason: my ambition. Things I want to forget: all of it. She wonders what Seungwan’s form looks like._

_“This kinda feels like divorce for people who can’t get married,” Seulgi tells Sooyoung, sitting next to her, white-knuckled but gentle as she closes her hand over Seulgi’s._

_Sooyoung is always a little brash, but not here, in this strange room with warmly painted walls and decor that feels as if they’re in someone’s home. The only thing different is the machine in the other room, and Seulgi’s belongings stacked in a huge, transparent box._

_“I still don’t think you should do it,” Sooyoung says, as Seulgi picks up the pen._

_“She wants me to.”_

_“She wants a lot of things from you,” Sooyoung points out adamantly, arms crossed over her chest, but even she knows it isn’t quite true._

_Seulgi remembers the stage, wide open and gaping, Seungwan in the front row, eyes bright with something Seulgi couldn’t forget. Remembers Seungwan standing, barefoot on her own two feet in the dressing room, waltzing along to the old song outside, face pressed into the crook of Seulgi’s neck. That one bright, brilliant pinprick of joy, Seungwan's eyes trained on her and her alone. The only ones she's ever really wanted._

_There’s one thing that Seulgi could give her now. She presses the pentip to the paper._

*

There’s some sort of tinny instrument Seulgi doesn’t recognize that’s playing as they walk down the street. 

As the sunlight starts to settle, it leaves their backs cold and spills over the tall spires of the church. It's then that Seulgi turns to look at Seungwan, at the softness of her cheeks, at her smile, tentative and warm and true. Something like forgiveness, even if Seulgi isn’t quite sure what for. Something like recklessness. 

“It’s a nice scarf,” Seungwan says, almost absentmindedly, except she's looking straight at it, the red and blue wrapped around Seulgi's neck. 

Seulgi blinks, before letting out a small laugh. Presses the fabric between her palms like a child.

“I knitted one like it a while back, for a friend or something, but I haven’t been able to find it, and she said I never gave it to her, so -”

Seulgi’s chest goes hot with the idea of Seungwan making a scarf for her. And it’s silly, that this girl she’s known for mere hours could incite a reaction like that.

“I would treasure it.”

Seungwan’s smile is soft. Seulgi is starting to memorize the shape of it, now. “I would.”

They’ve come to a big fountain that’s stopped for the day, leaving the square in a comfortable silence punctuated by the little children running around and a man with an accordion on the fountain steps.

All of it makes Seulgi feels like she could do something a little silly. So she holds a hand out in front of her, in front of Seungwan’s stomach, and the familiarity of the motion, of Seungwan's confused smile, startles her. As if Seulgi’s known her all her life, somehow, rather than met her hours ago on a train to Vienna. The accordionist is beginning to play a new song. An old song. _Come fly with me_.

“Will you dance with me?”

The sun sets much later in Europe, Seulgi has come to learn. And then night has the strange habit of falling all at once, blanketing the town in darkness. There’s still enough light, now, for Seulgi to watch the smile dance across Seungwan’s face. A mercy afforded to her.

“I can’t dance,” Seungwan says. It’s a light protest, soft and without bite as Seungwan tucks her face against her shoulder, and Seulgi guides her by the arm, hands on the small of her back until they’re toe to toe. 

She tilts her head closer to Seungwan’s, the brick walls stretching on forever into the other street as the city murmurs into nighttime. 

Seungwan lifts her head to watch Seulgi, to see the undeniable smile on her face. “You'll teach me, won't you?”

“No,” Seulgi says, surely. Watches Seungwan’s face crumple into laughter - real and warm, Seungwan who can’t help but laugh at all of her jokes. 

“I thought you said you were a professional dancer,” Seungwan accuses, even if it just sounds fond. Warm. Two strangers in the middle of a square, and Seulgi's heart in her hands.

“I was,” Seulgi says, reaching for Seungwan’s waist, soft where her fingertips land, and the blush that rages across her face like a painting. The light in her eyes, like the rising sun. And then Seulgi says something strange, and something she knows, somehow, to be true.

“Now I feel like I only want to dance with you.”

**Author's Note:**

> [♡](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpT6Ua3FIp8)


End file.
